The Quiet
Politics of Vineland
and One Battle After Another
When Thomas Pynchon
published Vineland in 1990, the novel read as a post-Reagan elegy for
the long twilight of the ’60s, populated by ex-radicals, countercultural
communes, and a society that had learned to domesticate dissent. Thirty-five
years later, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his loose,
fever-bright adaptation of Vineland, feels tuned to our late-digital
moment: a vision of political disillusion refracted through cinematic
spectacle.
One Battle After Another has been justly praised on
many fronts: for its storytelling, plot construction, pacing, and blending of
multiple tonal registers (political satire, action thriller, noir comedy), as
well as for the profound humanity of the main characters, so vividly rendered
that even the worst of them, the cruel and despicable Col. Lockjaw, elicits a
fleeting sense of empathy by the end , which is
not the case with the even more vile and obnoxious “Christmas adventurers”.
The cast, to be sure,
delivers career-best performances, breathing life into every nuance. And
visually, the film is indeed a feast, filled with arresting vistas and
breathtaking sequences – from the
opening border-wall tableau to the final car chase, with the camera arcing and
plunging like a surfer chasing a monstrous wave –, all crafted with artistry and bound together by Jonny Greenwood’s astonishing score, which
functions not merely as accompaniment but as an interpretive force in its own
right.
And yet, critical
reservations have emerged, particularly regarding the film’s depiction of
revolution and political action, and the ambiguity of its moral centre;
reservations that open a window onto its dialogue with Vineland.
Pynchon’s novel is a
sustained meditation on lost revolutionary potential and how remnants of that
energy might still be tapped at a time of political exhaustion. Set in 1984, it
continually flashes back to the ’60s counterculture, where spectral figures ( the
Thanatoids ) are haunted by the defeats of that era’s radical movements. By contrast, One Battle After Another has
been criticized, particularly from a leftist perspective, for transforming
political longing into spectacle, turning resistance into mere display. In this
view, revolutionary desire becomes kink or stylistic flourish rather than
collective orientation, obscuring the subtler, enduring political currents that
Pynchon cultivates.
Such a binary – the
power of memory versus the seduction of spectacle – misses
the deeper continuity between the works. Vineland reflects a moment of
disillusionment. Pynchon looks back at the ’60s through the lens of the Reagan
era, defined by corporate dominance, militarization, and the emergence of the
culture wars , features that today attain the paroxysm.
Though the Vietnam War was
over, the psychic aftermath of both the war and the counterculture’s failure to
sustain its radical ideals remained vivid. The novel is thus less an exercise
in nostalgia than an inquiry into the collapse of a particular vision of
freedom and revolution, exploring the gulf opened between promise and reality.
Pynchon portrays a
generation suspended between the remnants of non-conformism and the entrenched
conservative order that replaced it, a moment when resistance was
simultaneously fragmented, repressed, and co-opted, caught in the constant
tension between the desire for transformation and the crushing weight of power
structures.
The connection between the
two periods is tenuous but not entirely lost. Prairie Wheeler, the
fourteen-year-old daughter of former radicals, embodies this fragile
continuity. She may not inherit her mother Frenesi Gates’s revolutionary
fervor, yet she still inhabits a world shaped by that earlier struggle.
Beneath its comic surface, Vineland
exposes the legacy of COINTELPRO-style repression and the ways in which the
state systematically dismantled and absorbed anti-establishment dissent. Though
that utopian charge has waned, Pynchon suggests that traces persist, in memory,
in scattered acts of resistance, and in the absurd resilience of figures like
Zoyd Wheeler.
In Vineland, the
middle names of Prairie’s parents – Frenesi Margaret
Gates and Zoyd Herbert Wheeler – function
as covert historical signifiers that condense the ideological shift from the
radical ’60s to the neoliberal ’80s. “Margaret” invokes Thatcher and the
consolidation of market hegemony, while “Herbert” alludes to Marcuse, emblem
of the countercultural Left. Frenesi personifies seduction and betrayal: a
onetime radical turned state collaborator, moving from underground film
collectives to work for the Nixonian political pornography machine. Zoyd, by contrast,
now hapless, aging, and stuck in ritualized rebellion, represents a ghostly
trace of that earlier intellectual ferment, now faded into nostalgia and
farce.
Their unlikely union,
producing Prairie, allegorizes the fusion of these antagonistic legacies: the
utopian impulse of the ’60s – the
radical vision of a civilization of Eros – absorbed
and neutralized within the hyper-commodified, “post-ideological”
landscape of the Reagan era. Through this pairing, Pynchon dramatizes the
passage from the utopian and collectivist aspirations of the New Left to the
besieged and managed subjectivity of late imperial America.
That’s where the deviations
and overlapping between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film come into play. As
critic Rory Doherty notes in his review for Time magazine:
“Apart from their contrasting
structural approaches and character backstories, the biggest difference between
text and film is setting. Vineland is overflowing with period detail,
often ludicrous and sometimes satirically invented, rooted in the history of
radicals being expunged by the Nixonian establishment, leading to the
inevitable, reductive confines of Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ project. But the
immediacy of One Battle After Another – with its
ICE-like detention camps, unlawful militias storming American streets, and
elites who promote white supremacy in closed-door meetings – was
intended to embellish the spirit of Vineland rather than undermine it.”
Both novel and film imagine
the wreckage of American radicalism, but they do so through different narrative
devices and angles. In Pynchon’s novel, the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll
(PR³) and the film collective 24fps form a paired allegory for the counterculture’s
collapse into image and surveillance. In One Battle After Another, the
militant faction French 75 re-stages that collapse in a more literal, violent
key, turning the mediated irony of Pynchon’s world into a cinematic drama of
insurgency and defeat. Taken together, they trace the passage from revolution
as festival to revolution as ghost story.
In Vineland, PR³ is
born from the irreverent utopian impulse of the ’60s: a college enclave that
proclaims itself a sovereign micro-nation of peace, music, and weed. Pynchon
renders it with the tone of a deadpan fable: the moment when political desire
turns theatrical. Yet its very theatricality bears the imprint of its undoing.
The members of the commune are already performing their freedom for the camera,
which belongs to 24fps, the film collective that both documents and
aestheticizes dissent. When Frenesi, 24fps’s camerawoman, begins filming for
the authorities, the line between art and surveillance blurs. The revolution’s
dream of visibility curdles into exposure.
Allegorically, PR³ and
24fps represent the two faces of late-’60s radicalism: the yearning for
liberated community and the fatal belief that liberation could be seen , that
image was truth. Pynchon suggests that the counterculture’s tragedy lay not in
repression alone but in its transformation into spectacle, its incorporation
into the media economy it meant to overthrow.
One Battle After Another retools this parable into
a more direct historical allegory. Its insurgent cell, French 75, condenses the
real-world Weather Underground and similar militant groups that turned from
protest to armed struggle. Where PR³ parodies the carnival republic, French 75
enacts the firing squad’s logic, yielding to the twin temptations of moral
witness and elite voluntarism: the despairing revolt of a dissident
petty-bourgeois group without a popular base.
The film compresses
Pynchon’s layered temporality into a streamlined narrative of rise and ruin:
bombings, betrayals, the erosion of ideals. Allegorically, French 75 stands for
the afterimages of the ’60s, the moment when the spectacle of revolution
sought to shatter itself through violence, only to become another genre of
entertainment. The movie’s sleek cinematography and rhythmic editing make its
very depiction of militancy complicit in the spectacle it critiques,
accentuating that in both media ecologies, there is no exit from mediation.
Thus, PR³/24fps and French
75 form a dialectic. If Pynchon’s countercultural rebels are undone by
representation, Anderson’s radicals implode in the immediacy of outrage. One is
undone by the camera, the other by the gun. Between them unfolds the allegory
of American idealism’s decay: the slow drift from communal euphoria to
paranoia, from visibility to its weaponization.
By transforming PR³’s
stoned republic into French 75’s guerrilla network, One Battle After Another
trades Pynchon’s postmodern melancholy for tragic immediacy, yet both works end
in the same space: the Reaganite (or Trumpist, it makes no difference)
wasteland where rebellion survives only as image, an image that, in Anderson’s
hands, intensifies rather than resolves that condition.
In that sense, PR³, 24fps,
and French 75 are not different factions but sequential masks of the same
fallen dream. Each names a stage in the long allegory of resistance: first the
commune, then the camera, then the cell, each crushed, recorded, and replayed,
until nostalgia is all that remains.
Yet there is another side
to this story. Despite their differing emphases, both book and film are less
concerned with simply recalling the past than with imagining how
resistance, drawing on past experience, might persist in the present.
In Vineland,
Pynchon’s focus on family (Prairie, Zoyd, Frenesi) and on the fragile
solidarity of those left behind after the collapse of the counterculture points
to the endurance of resistance through everyday care, loyalty, and kinship. If One
Battle After Another carries this impulse forward, then what might appear
to some viewers as spectacularization becomes instead a cinematic retranslation
of that same political energy: a vision of how small solidarities, improvised
alliances, and acts of attention persist within the hypermediated landscape of
late neoliberalism. The parallel with Vineland might, in this sense,
shed further light on this transformation.
Pynchon’s novel moves in
the dreamlike, mnemonic, and fragmentary logic that defines his work: memory,
transgression, failure, and the not-yet matter as much as the ostensible plot.
Dreams and fantasies in Pynchon often operate as latent sites of political
desire.
In Vineland,
Prairie, the teenage girl yearning to reunite with her mother, stands in for
the desire to maintain continuity with a radical past, a past foreclosed amid
Reagan’s re-election campaign and by the then already omnipresent Tube
(television), yet enduring virtually. Prairie inherits history and its defeats,
though not in the same way as her parent’s generation. The crushed utopian
energies of the ’60s persist, lingering in the present and waiting for another
historical opening.
Watching archival footage
of an earlier protest, she feels a belated surge of its lost intensity:
“Even
through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the
liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that
nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen
anything like it before.” (Vineland, London: Minerva, 1990, p. 210)
Unlike in other Pynchon
novels, where stronger revolutionary dynamics offer some measure of redemption – think
the rocket counterforce in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or the anarchists of
Against the Day (2006) – Vineland presents a kind of
smaller-scale survival. This has little to do with the survivalism of
contemporary ideology; it concerns instead the endurance of a daughter, a
broken family, a deferred dream. The novel’s ironic, “sitcom-like” closure
signals the collapse of grand revolutionary energies, yet it also preserves the
conditions for residual hope, as a not-yet-conscious desire.
Domesticity, seemingly
apolitical, acquires a quiet political charge: everyday intimacy – family,
storytelling, solidarity – carries
its own utopian weight, a quiet refusal to surrender to surveillance and state
power.
Back to Anderson’s film,
reading it solely as a spectacle-driven flattening of utopian potential misses
its attention to alternative forms of resistance: the ways family (however
dysfunctional), lasting friendship, and the solidarity of margin-walkers operate
as loci of present-day political possibility, echoing Vineland’s
intimate counterforces.
In both works, “family”
does not mean private retreat but a resistant social microstructure. In Vineland,
Prairie’s search for her mother and the reconstitution of family becomes an
allegory for rebuilding social memory and solidarity among the dispossessed. In
One Battle After Another, family or communal ties among marginal figures
resist incorporation into spectacle.
The margins, here, are not
merely social but ontological , spaces
of possibility where people can still act outside pre-scripted media
narratives. This is Pynchon’s “counterforce” transposed into the visual
register: not heroic revolution but distributed, everyday persistence.
Consider, for instance,
Sensei Sergio’s (Willa’s Latino karate teacher) quiet
kindness, resourcefulness, and composure, each put to work within the
underground network protecting undocumented immigrants from fascist violence.
Also, in the same sequence of this whole alternative organization of urban
daily life – one of the film’s
highpoints –, the row-on-skateboard
shot: youth in motion becomes a visual motif for marginality and improvisation,
recalling the latent, restless energies of Pynchon’s world.
Skateboarding and urban or
suburban youth culture resurge here as a figurative synthesis of life pulsating
through camaraderie, rebellion, freedom, and the survival of alternative social
spaces within rigidly structured, often oppressive environments. Like Prairie’s
navigation of domestic and marginal spaces in Vineland, these fleeting
moments of youthful mobility suggest the ongoing possibility of living
otherwise, of asserting autonomy and solidarity under conditions that would
otherwise constrain and surveil. In such gestures, Anderson’s new film finds
its quiet politics: not the spectacle of sacrifice, but the slow labour of
care. Not, therefore, a revolution televised, but one quietly sustained, in
movement, memory, and ongoing attention.
Still, as Richard Brody
recently noted in The New Yorker, whereas films such as Godard’s La
Chinoise (1967) and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) sustained a
documentary rapport with real activists and with the immediate experience of
the political action they depict, One Battle After Another privileges
instead the register of affective labor, resulting, according to the critic, in
a film that is at once “brilliant and hollow”, “a vision of hopeful
possibilities” yet “unmoored from realities”.
What may appear as vacuity,
however, is less a failure of the film than the index of an objective impasse.
The absence of direct “revolutionary labor” reflects the very logic of late
neoliberalism, in which collective action, in the context of displaced industrialization
and hyperproductivity, has been utterly fragmented, depleted, and
aestheticized.
Ultimately, both Vineland
and One Battle After Another converge in the imagination of a politics
of the remainder, a politics of what persists when the grand narratives of
emancipation seem exhausted. Pynchon had already intuited, amid the
conservative backlash of the ’80s, that resistance would survive less as armed
insurgency than as residual energy, dispersed through everyday gestures of
care, memory, and solidarity. Anderson, in turn, translates this intuition into
the visual regime of the twenty-first century, in which total mediation and
spectacle have replaced direct experience. His wager is that pockets of meaning
and community can still be cultivated within this regime: autonomous zones of
affect and attention, where politics is relearned as a patient and shared
practice.
Far from standing in
opposition to collective organization, these zones may in fact be more closely
in tune with forms of control of economic power devised by and for the working
class, rooted in networks of material solidarity, mutual care, and the democratic
reappropriation of urban space, and the available resources and means of
production and survival.
What the film inherits from
Vineland is not merely disillusionment, but the persistence of the
possible in a time when we seem unable to see even a hand’s breadth ahead: a
minimal utopia, that insists on germinating beneath the ruins of the spectacle.
[A previous version of this
piece appeared in Portuguese on A
Terra é Redonda]